Somewhat hilariously they only relented on their refusal to make it easy to set WiFi and ssh up in the imager after somebody forked it and added those features.
Anyway I totally agree with you. I wish the Pi had decent support for writing bare metal code in the same way you would write microcontroller projects. 90% of the time all you want it to do is connect to wifi, and run one single program.
Running full Linux for that makes it actively worse than a unikernel / FreeRTOS style solution. But I expect the difficulty of making WiFi, USB, cameras, etc. work without Linux is too great.
Anyway I totally agree with you. I wish the Pi had decent support for writing bare metal code in the same way you would write microcontroller projects. 90% of the time all you want it to do is connect to wifi, and run one single program.
Running full Linux for that makes it actively worse than a unikernel / FreeRTOS style solution. But I expect the difficulty of making WiFi, USB, cameras, etc. work without Linux is too great.